Tag: massacre

In Turbulent Times

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Harry leaned forward, simultaneously closing the open drawer in which his Tarzan book was hidden. ‘I will, Mr Anderson,’ he said. ‘Oh, Jefferson’s just called to say the copper piping’s on its way.’
‘Good. Lock up before you leave, Harry. And don’t forget the keys tomorrow.’
Ian left the office, rushed down the stairs, brushed past a boy with a grey Belfast Telegraph bag of newspapers in the hall and walked quickly round the corner to where his car was parked.
Crazy fool, he chastised himself. What a stupid, cock-eyed, half-baked, wild idea.
He cursed his cock-eyed, half-baked, wild idea all the way to Lisburn. But he did not stop nor turn around. He swung his car with violence round the endless bends of the narrow road heading south from Lisburn. Stone walls, hedgerows, fields and gloomy woods, small, reedy lakes and low, elongated hills blurred past. Occasionally he turned his head to view a farmhouse that he fancied, then jerked his eyes back to the drunken road, and swung the white-clenched steering wheel in fury, like a ship’s skipper in a storm.
Take care, Ian Anderson. You have to get to Carraghlin in one piece.
He stopped the car at a crossroads garage to take in a couple of gallons of his precious petrol ration, still in force two years after the end of the war, courtesy of the Minister of Fuel and Power. Then off again with a bound like a horse from an unbolted stable: up the long hill and down again, up and down, up and down, leaping over the rolling, rollicking, rock-littered countryside. Cresting the last hill, the sudden view of the distant Drumard hills struck him like a pie hurled in his face. At Tranaliskeen he saw the sea and the long, white line of a lapping wave. A few minutes later he pulled up outside the Seaview Restaurant in Carraghlin. He stared at the gloomy overhang of high hills, at the hunched shoulders and brooding presence of Slieve Corragh that overshadowed the town like the giant that threatened the village in fairy tales.
Ian entered the restaurant, ordered a mixed grill, and unfolded the morning’s Newsletter. Restaurants were exempt from rationing, which inflated resentment against the rich, who could augment their food allowance by eating out frequently and extravagantly. To restrict this resentment, certain rules had been instituted, such as no meal could cost more than five shillings or consist of more than three courses.

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The Unquiet Land

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…his training at the seminary, his acceptance by the Church. Obviously His Holiness did not know the full story of this dark man from the mountains of Drumard or wherever it was he came from in the first place. Obviously His Holiness did not know from whom this same man received his education: from pagans and harlots. To have sent back to them this man from the shadow side of time and place, to have ordained him as their own new priest, the old ones regarded as an insult and an outrage. Padraig knew when he returned to the village that few of his flock had accepted him with any willingness and far less with trust. But he had proved himself in only a short time. Now all was lost. Their old suspicions had returned. They remembered. They talked. They retold stories. Some no doubt had seen him shudder or shake or stiffen or stumble and fall. They knew that Satan had come back for him. They knew that his celebration of the Mass was a sacrilege. They were affronted. Their gaze burned like hell-fire. Even the young spurned him; they spat at his passing in the street. When he stood at the altar, holding aloft the Host in celebration of the Eucharist, Padraig could feel their conspiratorial sneaking-forward down the hushed nave of the church, their long knives drawn, their white teeth gleaming like the fangs of wolves, their wild hearts pounding with the urgent wish to kill him.
Padraig no longer had his arm in a sling, but the cuts and bruises on his face had not yet completely healed, though the earlier discoloration was fading. He strode across the stone floor of the sacristy and stopped at the door, his hand outstretched but unwilling to lift the wrought-iron latch. His head ached. Satan thumped the insides of his temples, punched the backs of his eyes, drummed loudly in the whorled cavities of his ears. Padraig opened the heavy, dark door, and his arm jerked with pain. He looked out into the church. In less than two hours he must face the hostile crowd that would come to the wedding of Caitlin MacLir and Michael Carrick. The church was empty yet, except for two young altar boys who were talking earnestly in the front pew.
“Stephen,” Padraig called, steadying himself against the door post. “Stephen, come here a minute.” His voice boomed like explosions in his head.
One of the altar boys, one of Joe Carney’s sons, came forward, unsurely as the young Samuel. “Yes, Father?”
“Stephen, do you have your bicycle outside?”
“I do, Father.” The surprise that showed in Stephen’s eyes was a response either to the unexpected question or to the look of black-eyed distraction in the drawn face of the priest.

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The Unquiet Land

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The old woman knew that Caitlin and Michael had started sleeping together again sometime after the night that Caitlin had not come home, and Padraig had been beaten up in the church. Even if Caitlin had not told Mother Ross the full story of that night, the old woman would have known without any doubt everything that had happened.
Poor Caitlin. There’ll be fingers counting soon and they won’t make it to nine. Respectability holds us all to ransom. And we have to pay something in the end. The dearer we regard respectability, the higher we have to pay. I got off lightly, I suppose. But I can recognise respectability for the blackguard it is. And yet I too paid a price in the end.
Mother Ross sat down on the iron bed. One of the brass knobs shook, fell off with a thud on the floor and rolled under the bed.
“You can stay there,” she said.
She rubbed the finger of her left hand where her ring used to be. It had been her mother’s wedding ring, then her own, and yesterday she had taken it off and given it to Michael. Today Michael would use it to bond the two lives, the two bodies, the two souls, of Caitlin and himself.
And Caitlin. Sick and straining with the baby already unfurling inside her like a sticky little bud in spring. Wearing her white gown like the thorn tree on the hillside. The white gown she had stitched herself in the evenings by the fireside.
Mother Ross heard Caitlin climb slowly up the stairs and go into her room to prepare herself for the wedding. The motor-car would call in a couple of hours: Liam Devlin’s newest Ford. Michael had been proud to hire it for the afternoon to drive his bride to church. Liam was proud to drive it. Half the village would line the road, not just to admire Caitlin, but to marvel at the new miracle of the machine age: Liam Devlin’s Model T Ford. Soon every man in the village would want one, and Liam’s ambition was to open a garage on the Lisnaglass road to sell new motor cars, the petrol that made them go, and all the spare parts that likely would be needed after miles of bumpy travel on the rough and muddy roads of the country hereabouts.
Caitlin left the door of her room open, and Mother Ross could hear her sobbing. So rarely did Caitlin weep that it moved Mother Ross all the more when she did. Like hearing a man cry. Mother Ross sighed a sigh that pulled her heart up with it into her throat. She swallowed it painfully and wanted to cry herself from the agony she felt.

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In turbulent Times

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Six people crowded the car as it sleeked through the night, climbing into the mountains on winding, unlit roads. Nora sat in the back between Susan and Ian. Ian smelt her perfume, and it tantalised him. He pressed closer to her in the shadows. His left arm rested along the top of the seat. Nora, leaning her head back with a contented sigh, touched Ian’s arm and sat up straight again.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘That’s all right. Lie back if you want to.’
‘No, I’m fine,’ she said disingenuously.
Clifford slowed the car almost to a stop, then swung it to the left down a steep, stony, track not much wider than the car, its headlights illuminating the constricting dry-stone walls. He eased the car round a corner into a grassy yard in front of a small, two-storeyed, white-washed, slate-roofed cottage.
‘Home from home,’ he said. ‘Country style.’
Clifford cut the car’s bright beams, plunging the passengers into pitch darkness. Then the interior lights came on as the Bentley doors opened. Ian took Nora’s hand and helped her out.
‘Thank you, kind sir.’ She bobbed him a little curtsey. Even in the gloom Ian caught her captivating smile.
The cottage was dark. Everyone stood in a huddle inside the door till Clifford located and lit an oil lamp. Then they moved into the room and looked around at the white-washed walls; the old, dark-toned, wooden table; the dresser; the chairs; the big, deep, well-used armchair beside the hearth. In the spacious fireplace a fire was already set. All it took was a dash of paraffin oil and a lighted match and the flames and sparks were leaping in a crackling frenzy into the large, blackened chimney. On the mantelpiece an old pendulum clock stood at rest between two creamy china dogs. On the dresser shelves an array of blue, willow-patterned plates and cups and large, stout mugs with blue rings gleamed in the light of the fire and the lamp. Fiona lit a second lamp.
‘This is just heavenly,’ Susan exclaimed in a high, excited voice. ‘John, wouldn’t you just love to live in a place like this?’

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The Unquiet land

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“Beware of pride, Caitlin,” Padraig admonished. “‘Pride goeth before destruction.’ Learn another lesson from your father. He was a proud man. He sought self-sufficiency and in doing so displayed spiritual pride, what the Greeks called hubris. They warned—and no one knew this better than Finn MacLir—that hubris was certain to attract the gods’ disfavour. Hubris is the sin of sins, the primal cause of sin. It consists in man’s belief that he can lift himself to the level of the divine. Beware of that, Caitlin. Only by recognising our complete worthlessness can we find salvation, entirely through God’s grace.”
Caitlin looked steadfastly at Padraig. Then she said slowly, as if weighing her words, “If you thought you could ever win my father to Christianity with a message like that—recognising our complete worthlessness—you must be very, very stupid, Padraig. No wonder my father had nothing but utter contempt for your beliefs.”
Caitlin could see from the narrowing of Padraig’s eyes and the tightening of the muscles in his jaw that her words had hurt him; but she was relentless. “He scorned your God, Padraig. He scorned all the gods. You call it hubris, the sin of sins. Finn MacLir was guilty of it, blatantly guilty. Yet he defied the gods to the very end. And even in the clutches of death they could not break his spirit. He was a man, Padraig, a proud man, and proud to be man. And I am proud to have been his daughter.”
Caitlin rose angrily, strode out of the room and slammed the door behind her.
҂
She brushed the small heap of dust into a shovel and tossed it outside through the door of the cottage. The cool evening breeze whirled it away towards the stone wall by the head of the loaney. Michael would soon be coming up the loaney from the house, and Caitlin looked for the big, familiar figure, his shoulders almost as wide as the rough path between the walls, his hair almost as yellow as the flowers on the whins. But he did not appear. He had gone to the village to talk business with Joe Carney, the skipper of Finn’s fishing boat, the Drumard Maid. Michael wanted to sell the boat, and Joe wanted to buy. Perhaps they had made a deal and gone to the Harbour Bar to seal it.
Caitlin’s gaze shifted from the shadowed loaney to the direction of the harbour at Corrymore, far below her, and the ruins of Killyshannagh Church. Below the green sod and the dark earth down there, unseen from…

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In Turbulent Times

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‘Yes, Nora. Yes, I honestly do.’
‘I wish I could share your optimism.’
‘You’re becoming cynical in your old age, Nora. You need cheering up.’
Nora looked behind her towards the door. ‘I don’t know what’s keeping Janet.’
‘I wouldn’t even like to hazard a guess,’ Clifford said with a smile. ‘Would you like me to order drinks for you now? What were you and Janet … ? Ah, here she comes.’ He stood up as Janet rushed in.
‘Sorry I was so long, Nora,’ Janet said, ‘but I kept meeting people. Robert Purdy’s here with his fiancée. And the whole Morgan family from Clondarragh.’
‘Janet, you know Dr Hamilton, don’t you?’
‘But of course I do. How are you, Dr Hamilton? We haven’t seen you down in our part of the world for ages.’
‘I’m fine, thank you, Janet. It’s a pleasure to see you again. I hope your mother and father are well.’
‘Hale and hearty, Dr Hamilton. I’ll tell them you were asking after them.’
‘Yes, please do,’ said Clifford. ‘I actually came to invite you and Nora to join us at our table. My wife, my son, his girlfriend, and some friends of ours are there.’
‘That would be very nice,’ said Janet. ‘We usually have more company with us, but they all had other things to do this evening.’
Clifford led the way to his own table and made the necessary introductions. Nora and Janet sat down on two extra chairs that John had already added to the group.
Nora sat between John and Ian, Janet between Ian and Clifford.
‘Now, what is everyone drinking?’ Clifford asked.
Fiona and Susan had had enough, they said. Janet and Catriona asked for lemonade. Julian a Macallan single-malt Scotch—‘If they have any.’ Nora ordered gin and orange.
‘Mother’s ruin, Nora,’ said John. ‘Make mine a John Powers, Clifford.’
‘Julian’s choice of Scotch for me too,’ said Ian.
‘Do you ever drink anything else, Ian?’
‘Only Drambuie, but not now.’
Clifford smiled. ‘You’ll have Coca Cola in your whiskey, I suppose.’
‘Get away with you, man,’ Ian scolded. ‘Even though I know you’re joking, you should still be horse-whipped for a crack like that. In Scotland we don’t joke about our Scotch.’

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The Unquiet Land

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…she died of consumption, God rest her soul. Flynn was well up in his teens by then and already working in McGuigan’s quarry. But he grew up with a chip on his shoulder as big as a boulder and a fierce hatred of the English that he’s nurtured for years.”
“He needs to learn the lesson of forgiveness,” Padraig remarked.
“Forgiveness is a rare commodity in Ireland, Padraig,” Mother Ross said. “Irishmen never forgive and never forget. That’s their nature.” She paused, staring into the hearth. Then she asked, “What about Caitlin?”
“What about Caitlin?” Padraig repeated with more feeling than he meant to show.
Mother Ross looked suspiciously at Padraig, but gave him no inkling of the thoughts that rushed through her mind. “Is Caitlin ready to be married in church?”
“She is now, yes,” Padraig replied with a touch of petulance.
“Finn didn’t know, did he?”
Padraig walked across to the door and leaned against the wall beside it. His shoulder and his broken ribs were painful. “Oh Finn knew all right,” he said, but his face had an uncomfortable, guilty look.
Mother Ross made no comment. She felt that Padraig and Caitlin together had indecently betrayed the man who had been closest to both of them. And yet she could not see how anyone but Finn MacLir himself could live outside the Church. She was happy for Caitlin, but disappointed at the same time. “Then they won’t have to wait long before they can be married.”
“They have only to name the day.”
Neither Mother Ross nor Padraig spoke, and they were still silent when voices and footsteps were heard outside, and doors opened both in the front and the back of the house.
“I still think we should have buried his wine alongside of him,” someone said.
“Yes, think how happy he’d be if he woke up one night and found it there beside him.”
“He wouldn’t want to get out.”
“Not till the bottle was empty at any rate.”
“Bottle be damned; he drank it by the barrelful.”
“What an old sot he was.”
“Ay, but you don’t find his likes below every hedge.”
“I’ve heard many a woman between Iceland and the Isle of Wight say the same thing about him.”

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In Turbulent Times

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‘Susan, that’s unkind.’ Clifford considered Susan rather trying at times.
‘It’s also unkind of you two to get on to shop-talk when we’re out enjoying ourselves,’ Susan countered. ‘Ask her to join us. Let’s give her a good time.’
‘Maybe I will in a moment.’ Clifford took a thoughtful sip of his brandy.
‘I suppose Liam’s looking after the children,’ said Fiona.
‘Or Nora’s mother is,’ Clifford suggested.
‘You mean that pretty girl has children already?’ John could not conceal his surprise.
‘Two of them,’ Fiona answered. ‘A boy and a girl.’
‘She didn’t waste any time,’ Ian remarked.
‘They’re young, of course,’ said Fiona. ‘Four years and two and a half, I believe.’
‘Don’t look now, Ian Anderson,’ said John, ‘but Clifford has just gone to get you a woman: a dark beauty of black, remorseless tragedy.’
‘You’re drunk, John Simpson,’ Susan said. ‘How many sneakies did you have at the bar?’
‘Listen to her, Ian,’ John said. ‘Not a month married and she’s nagging the hell out of me already. Are you sure you really want a wife?’
‘Very sure,’ Ian replied firmly.
‘I don’t imagine that you would be nagging Julian, Catriona,’ John said, ‘when you are only a month into your marriage.’
‘I’d wait for two months,’ said Catriona. Like Ian’s, her voice too was richly seasoned with Fiona’s lost ‘oats and haggis.’
‘You’d better watch that one, Julian,’ John warned light-heartedly.
‘What Clifford didn’t tell you,’ Fiona began, leaning forward to speak in confidence, ‘is that he delivered that young lady—at her birth, I mean—when he was barely two months into his internship. It was a very difficult placenta previa delivery that required a C-section under the most primitive conditions. He almost lost the mother and the baby too.’
‘Good old Clifford,’ said John. ‘A born surgeon and one of the best we have in the country.’
‘But the sad result of Clifford’s first major surgery,’ Fiona said, ‘is that the mother was left unable to bear children. Clifford blames himself for that. Unfairly, I think. Given his age and inexperience at the time, he did well to save the lives of both the mother and her baby. But he rarely talks about it. He has received both high commendation and strong condemnation from the local doctors in the area.’

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In Turbulent Times

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‘This has been a splendid day.’ Clifford Hamilton pronounced each word separately, distinctly and with obvious satisfaction.
‘I’ll drink to that,’ said John Simpson, a prematurely balding colleague of Clifford’s at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. He was an English-trained heart specialist who had come to Belfast from the Royal Army Medical Corps after the war.
‘I think we can all drink to that.’ Clifford’s wife Fiona displayed her prominent teeth. ‘And to your fiftieth birthday, darling. What a wonderful way to celebrate.’
A chorus of ‘Hear, hear’; ‘Happy five-o, Clifford’; ‘Great day altogether’ responded to Fiona’s remarks.
The five members of the jovial party had spent the day in Clifford’s new Bentley—a birthday present to himself—driving around the countryside of the Drumard hills and visiting places that Clifford had known as a boy. He had amused his passengers like an Irish jarvey with stories and histories and half-remembered ballads about drumlins and dolmens, outlaws and rebels, murders and massacres, big houses and castles, and their restless ghosts. The sun had shone all day from an unblemished sky; the road had shimmered in front of them; the sea glimmered and sparkled; and the mountains languished in a lavender haze, like a herd of huge animals sprawling in the sun at noon. The journey had ended at the Drumard Strand Hotel, a large red sandstone building on the green foreshore at Carraghlin, where Clifford and Fiona’s twenty-year-old son Julian and his girlfriend Catriona had joined them.
‘I admit it’s not my favourite bit of architecture,’ Clifford had said of the hotel. ‘But here we can dine in a manner befitting the mood of the day—splendidly. A grotty little cafe on the main street just wouldn’t have been right.’
‘And what can you tell us about this place, Clifford?’ asked John Simpson’s recently married wife, Susan, a short, slim, sharp-featured young woman from a wealthy, landowning politician’s family in Oxfordshire.

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The Unquiet Land

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“It’s like I told the police, Ignatius,” Liam replied. “It was early morning. And I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I did see someone running from the church, but he was disappearing over the ridge in the direction of Lisnaglass.”
“Just one man?” Sweeney asked.
“I saw only one,” Liam told him.
“Lisnaglass is full of Unionist louts,” someone observed. “So you didn’t see who it was?”
“No, I didn’t.” Liam was almost certain that the culprit he had seen running from the church was Michael Carrick, but he saw no reason why Michael, of all people, would have given Father Padraig so severe a beating and carried out such vandalism in the church. By the time the police interviewed him he had convinced himself that he had been mistaken. He had also decided that even if it had been Michael, he could not have informed against him. Michael Carrick, everyone knew, was going to marry Caitlin MacLir, and Liam could do nothing that would destroy the happiness of a woman he hopelessly fawned on, like a devoted pup.
“You weren’t at the burying, Padraig,” Sweeney remarked.
“No, in all conscience I felt that I was unable to be there, Ignatius,” Padraig replied. “The burying, as you called it, was not a Christian one. And the graveyard at Killyshannagh is no longer consecrated ground. As a priest I felt that I could not honestly take part. However much I loved Finn MacLir. It was not the way I wanted to see him go.” A feeling of having been cheated by God Himself strengthened insuppressibly in Padraig’s breast. “But it was Finn’s own wish.”
Padraig’s words were like rocks tied to his ankles that sunk the priest in Sweeney’s estimation.
You could have put on a suit, Sweeney thought, forgot you were a priest for a few hours, and come to the funeral of the man who rescued you, raised you, paid for your education. You’re a sanctimonious hypocrite, Father Padraig. You deserved that hiding. I’d love to give you one myself. Sweeney walked away, disappointed and disgusted.
The general conversation in the MacLir house splintered, as those present addressed their neighbours rather than the group at large. Jim Patterson, finding himself with no one to talk to, caught the eye of Clifford Hamilton in the far corner of the dining room. Clifford, in a tailored black suit and white shirt, was leaning against the wall between the window and the bookcase. Jim Patterson crossed the crowded room and joined him. “How are you, Clifford?”
“Can’t complain, Jim. How’s yourself?”

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